Shannon never does have the life-altering experience or emotional epiphany you’d like, and the dialogue often resembles...
Minnesota-bred Olson debuts with a blistering lampoon of Gen-X angst.
Not only does heroine Shannon Olson have the same name as the author, but their mothers are both named Flo. Shannon, 31, who’s been in therapy for five years, has a mind-numbing job testing software for an upstart computer company in the Minneapolis suburbs—given her habit of coming in late and taking long lunches she can’t understand why the boss doesn’t fire her—and she’s tired of her oversexed, often-unemployed, video game–playing boyfriend. She’s so tired of him, in fact, that she never refers to him by name but simply as “my boyfriend.” Everybody on Love Boat found someone, she whines to her acerbic and impatient therapist, so why can’t she? Eventually, Shannon trades in her boring job for a university assistantship and her slacker boyfriend for a ruggedly handsome Italian studying architecture. This new boyfriend—he’s got a name, Michael—ambitious and attentive, is a big improvement over the old one—but, alas, Shannon quickly develops the same ambivalence toward him. The one thing Shannon can’t trade in is her mother. She loathes her mother’s small-town, doctor’s-wife life, yet she envies her ability to make lemonade from the many lemons tossed her way. “You have to make her seem small and ridiculous in order to feel good about yourself,” her therapist scolds. But try as she might, Shannon simply can’t buck her clinical depression. She wonders, in fact, whether depression may not be the correct biological response to living in America. Only when her mother develops a tumor does she come close to taking responsibility for her inner demons.
Shannon never does have the life-altering experience or emotional epiphany you’d like, and the dialogue often resembles sitcom banter. Still, Olson has scored a direct hit on her generation’s inability to quit the bellyaching and get on with it.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89208-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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